Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity

Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity

Synopsis

In this incisive account, scholar Horace Campbell investigates the political and economic crises of the early twenty-first century through the prism of NATO's intervention in Libya. He traces the origins of the conflict, situates it in the broader context of the Arab Spring uprisings, and explains the expanded role of a post-Cold War NATO. This military organization, he argues, is the instrument through which the capitalist class of North America and Europe seeks to impose its political will on the rest of the world, however warped by the increasingly outmoded neoliberal form of capitalism. The intervention in Libya- characterized by bombing campaigns, military information operations, third party countries, and private contractors- exemplifies this new model.

Campbell points out that while political elites in the West were quick to celebrate the intervention in Libya as a success, the NATO campaign caused many civilian deaths and destroyed the nation's infrastructure. Furthermore, the instability it unleashed in the forms of militias and terrorist groups have only begun to be reckoned with, as the United States learned when its embassy was attacked and personnel, including the ambassador, were killed. Campbell's lucid study is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this complex and weighty course of events.

Excerpt

This book began as the February 17 uprisings exploded in Libya in 2011. At that moment, the world had been transfixed by the earthshaking events that had toppled the leadership in Tunisia and Egypt. Peter Hallward, a student of the Haitian Revolution of 1804, had remarked that “Egypt’s popular revolution will change the world.” Progressive forces internationally had been impressed by the new forms of political organizing that had birthed these revolutionary openings. Two years earlier, I had written Barack Obama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the United States. In that book, I drew out the convergence of political, economic, ecological, and social contexts that gave rise to the new political alliance that was growing inside the United States. I identified the networks of peace and social justice forces that had been mobilized to defeat the neoconservatives. The book was intended to rethink the basic ideas of revolutionary politics for the twenty-first century.

I was in Nairobi, Kenya, when the first news began to emerge about the Benghazi demonstrations. The response of Gaddafi to these demonstrations was of great concern, but soon it became obvious that the forces of counterrevolution were busy seeking to exploit . . .